Showing posts with label caritas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label caritas. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Should there be a leftist nationalist party?

I was at an Australian reddit site the other night and stumbled upon an interesting thread. Someone asked the question why there were no left-wing nationalist parties in Australia (I don't think there are any right-wing ones either).

As an insight into the mind of left-wingers, a common answer was that the left doesn't support nationalism because it wants to help everyone:
Homiros: If you are a true left party, your main focus should be the welfare of all people.

FvHound: Us lefties don't want a compromise with the right. We want to help EVERYONE

Clearly, there are left-wingers who like to see themselves as compassionate types. Perhaps, therefore, an important aspect of challenging left-wing thought is to point out the hurt and damage that left-wing positions cause to many people.

Why would the left think of itself as helping everyone? Two possible causes spring to mind. The first is the political shift that happened in the late 1800s/early 1900s. The older liberals in the U.S. believed that the Anglo-Saxons had a special dispensation to bring freedom and Evangelical Christianity to the world. The new liberals challenged this view by rejecting the ethnic particularity and (often) by rejecting Christianity, in favour of a more ecumenical, cosmopolitan and humanistic view.

If you see yourself as serving "Humanity" in a cosmic sense, rather than God, then your focus will be a universal one (you won't be focused on helping your own nation, as the entity you have set up to serve is a global Humanity).

However, another possible explanation is that the leftist view is a cut-down, secularised version of a certain type of Christian ethics. If you think that the essence of morality is a vaguely universal command to help everyone including (or especially) the stranger or the marginalised, then you might well think that being a good person means, vaguely, a commitment "to help everyone".

It's true that the modern left has become cosmopolitan. However, what is less clear is that the move to vaguely universal commitments has oriented the left toward "serving everyone". The universalism seems instead to go along with a radical individualism, in which what matters is individual rights or the unfettered pursuit of individual wants or the liberty to define one's own good.

Furthermore, where the left is oriented toward community, it is often on an "assortative" basis, i.e. it is a gathering of people who share the same intellectual aspirations, the same political values and similar lifestyle markers. The left is very good at establishing community for itself on this basis - in some ways it has replaced the idea of ethny.

Why is this significant? Because when a communal identity is an ethnic one it means that we show a love for, and service toward, our coethnics who may not be part of our own caste or class: they may live in the countryside and not the inner city; they may eat fast food and drink beer; they may watch Channel 10 and not the ABC; read the Herald Sun and not The Age and so on.

But the left is not challenged in this way. In practice, leftists often show a disdain for those who do not share their own lifestyle markers - that is part of the way the boundaries of leftist community are upheld.

What traditionalists would argue is that we are not called to help everyone in a vaguely universal way. Our commitments are more bracing that that. We are made for particular relationships, relationships which imply specific loves and duties. Christianity does, it is true, remind us that our commitments don't stop at those we are most closely related to; this does not mean, though, that we are stripped of our given natures, or that we disregard natural law (or much of scripture) and seek to erase the significance of all those relationships bar the single, universal one.

For that reason a leftist should, just like any other person, seek to fulfil a relationship with a spouse, with children, with a wider family, with a local community (including those who do not aspire to intellectual class status) and with coethnics, as well as then helping others.

Saturday, December 28, 2013

Will they ever learn? Commune vs family

I wrote a post once about the Oneida commune titled Was free love really so free? It dealt with a commune set up in America in the 1840s in which marriage was abolished and replaced with free love.

Despite having the aim of freedom, it ended up as an authoritarian system in which 300 people were governed by 27 standing committees and in which the older men decided who would be allowed to pair off (and they decided to pair off very young girls with themselves).

Now a documentary film traces a similar attempt to establish such a commune in Austria in the 1970s and 80s. The documentary was made by a man who grew up as a child in the Friedrichshof commune, Paul Julien Robert.


Paul Julien Robert, grew up in the Friedrichshof commune

The Friedrichshof commune was founded by an artist named Otto Mühl. The aim of the commune was to dissolve marriage and the family and to abolish private property. "It was about free sexuality and communal property," is how one participant described its goals.

Paul Julien Robert's mother signed up because she thought she was joining "a nice commune." Paul Julien was not allowed to know his biological father; he lived with his mother until he was four and then she was sent away by the commune to Switzerland to earn money. He was made to chant slogans like "My mum drove off to Zurich. Since then, I feel better and better every day."

Members of the commune were expected to perform symbolic acts of matricide and patricide in order to overcome "their authoritarian generation". The founder of the commune, Otto Mühl, in addressing the members of the commune, would say things like: "We have already been able to break free and save some from this nuclear family filth."

But destroying the family did not create free love or an absence of authoritarianism. Instead, it replaced the authority of loving, caring parents with that of a single man, Otto Mühl. He has been described as "cruel, controlling and authoritarian." He created a hierarchical structure with himself at the top and several women competing for power below him. He allowed himself a wife and was the only one with the authority to punish the children. When the commune dissolved in 1990 he was arrested and convicted of sexual abuse of minors.

One book on the commune paints this picture of Friedrichshof:
The fact is that the alternative community trial of the 70's more and more led to a totalitarian system of mutual spying and sexual abuse of minors, rape, forced abortion...

Nor did free love engender love. Paul Julien Robert says of his time in the commune after his mother left:
"I was very lonely. Other women replaced her, but they were never close to me. The ideology was that all relationships were bad for the group, so it was never possible to truly bond with someone."

Did he feel loved? "Never. I grew up believing love was something bad. The feeling of being loved, and of expressing love, was something I really had to learn and to accept later."

..."There was a general lack of affection from the adults – no one held me or was tender towards me as a child."

There is a lesson here for all those who preach an indistinct, universal love - this is not likely to lead to real love. Real love flourishes within particular relationships; it is particularly fostered within close family relationships. If we grow up within a loving family, we are more likely to love our neighbour and community, which makes us more likely to love our nation and people, which makes us more likely to love a wider humanity.

If you chop away at the closer loves, you don't clear the way for a universal love of humanity, you diminish the capacity for love altogether.

The preview video below is worth watching but is slightly NSFW. The documentary itself is called "My Fathers, my Mother and Me" or in German "Meine keine Familie" which means something like "My not a family." If you're interested in more there's an interesting review of the documentary here.

Tuesday, November 05, 2013

The BBC Debate 2

In my last post I discussed a debate on immigration that was held on BBC radio. John Derbyshire has a report on the debate at Vdare and has also provided a transcript.

If you read through the debate you understand why things are going wrong in the West. Both the secular and the Christian participants held views which made open borders the "moral" position to take. They did so by following what you might call the "intellectual disease" which is to reduce life to a single intellectual principle and then try to derive moral positions from this single principle.

The Christian view was represented primarily by Giles Fraser, an Anglican cleric. Fraser is unusual in that he has very clearly rejected liberalism as a philosophy, but he has done so in the name of socialism (which goes to show that rejecting liberalism is only the first step, what comes next is equally important).

Fraser justifies open borders, and the massive transformation of Europe that necessarily follows, on the basis of certain passages of scripture:
The bit that comes to mind in the Scriptures for me is that very moving bit in Matthew 25 where Jesus goes, you know, "You saw me in prison, you didn't do anything, you, you didn't give me any food, I was a stranger and you didn't welcome me," and they go, "When was that?" and they say, "Inasmuch as you didn't do it to the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you did it to me." I mean, there's a whole implication there that if you're not welcoming the stranger, you're not welcoming Christ.

...you know, constantly in Jesus' teaching there's stuff about the stranger, there's stuff about the other, there's stuff about the Good Samaritan, and our moral responsibility is always to this person who is more other than us, rather than same as us.

The last line is the critical one. Fraser believes, from his reading of scripture, that our responsibility is always to those who are more "other" to us. If you believe this, then of course you're going to identify with the Muslim Africans seeking entry to Europe rather than with your fellow Europeans. Fraser, despite his repudiation of liberalism as a philosophy, has ended up with a very similar view of solidarity to liberals, namely that true solidarity is with those most other to us, rather than those we are most closely related to.

It should be said that you can see why Fraser might derive this idea from the New Testament. Jesus does emphasise in his teachings that benevolence is to be selfless (in the sense that we do not expect anything in return) and that it extends to strangers. Jesus says things like this:
But if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.

In context, Jesus is clearly emphasising that we are not to be benevolent to get something for ourselves - that is the intended message. But you can see how it might be taken to mean that the love we have for those we are related to, and who have reason to love us, is insignificant.

I don't think such a reading makes much sense. Jesus elsewhere says that in order to be saved we must honour our father and mother - why would that be so important if all that matters is our relationship to the stranger?

In practice, too, it is no small thing to love those who love us. To truly love our spouse over a lifetime, through all the stresses and hardships of life, and still to cherish them, to admire them and to find delight in our relationship with them is no small thing. To truly love our children, to have a continuing pride in our paternal relationship with our sons and to seek out an active companionship with them, to feel a loving protectiveness toward our daughters, and to be driven to provide the best start in life for our children, that is no small thing. And to love those we are related to as part of our ethny, to sense the life that we share with them and to seek to uphold the good within our common tradition - that is no small thing either.

It used to be the case that Western civilisation continued to respect these loves, but also took seriously the injunction to be benevolent to "the least among you." That gave rise to traditions of Christian charity, of noblesse oblige and of codes of chivalry.

The codes of chivalry are particularly interesting. They combined Christian benevolence (mercy, protection of the weak and the poor) with duties to countrymen and faithfulness to the church. This is a much more viable basis for a Christian civilisation than Giles Fraser's dissolving formulation that "our moral responsibility is always to this person who is more other than us, rather than same as us" - a formulation which would deliver Europe to an Islamic and African future rather than a Christian European one.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Collapsing distinctions

In 1975 the Catholic Church produced a document called Persona Humana dealing with sexual morality. Zippy Catholic has quoted a small passage from it, which I think is profoundly relevant today:
Hence, those many people are in error who today assert that one can find neither in human nature nor in the revealed law any absolute and immutable norm to serve for particular actions other than the one which expresses itself in the general law of charity and respect for human dignity.

What does this mean? It is saying that the command to love one another (the general law of charity) is taken by some people to be the only principle that we have to follow.

It's interesting that this problem was recognised by the Church as long ago as 1975. It seems to me today to be the chief error besetting the Christian churches, including the Catholic Church.

Why is it such a problem? The easy answer is that if you believe that the command to love one another is the only principle that we have to follow, then all other moral principles are dissolved or collapsed. I can go and commit any kind of sin I like, but none of it matters as long as I am oriented to a universal love.

But there's more to it than this. If the only thing we have to consider is a universal love, then we also collapse or dissolve particular forms of reality, such as the distinct ways that we have been created in our nature, the particular forms of relationships that we commit to in life, and the particular goods that we seek to uphold.

A good example of this is the theology of the leader of the American Episcopalians, Katharine Jefferts Schori. She believes that we should love every single person in the same way that we would love our "lover" (her term). So instead of there being a distinct expression of marital love, with its particular qualities, goods and duties, I'm supposed to extend the same love to everyone.

Katharine Jefferts Schori has even taken the "love your neighbour" command (caritas) to collapse distinctions between humans and microbes:
“Microbes are part of us, in a very real sense our intimate neighbors or members, and the task is to learn how to manage the system for better health as a whole and in all its parts,” Jefferts Schori proposed.

“This work is about consciousness of our connection to the whole, and tender care of the other parts of that whole,” Jefferts Schori intoned. “It is simply another form of loving our neighbor as ourselves, for the neighbor is actually part of each one of us.”

I don't believe that a church can survive if it doesn't take man as he really is, in his created nature, in the range and depth of his relationships, in his particular loves and attachments, in his full comprehension of the moral good, in the full range of his experience of the transcendent in life, and in the particular ways that he fulfils his created being.

To collapse or dissolve is the wrong path to follow. Caritas is certainly a core principle of Christianity, but not as practised by a detached or abstracted individual, but by individuals inhabiting a more complex order of being.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

We need to reform Christian culture

Why has the West fallen so far? The major culprit is the state ideology, namely secular liberalism. But I think it has to be recognised as well that the current Christian culture also feeds into this liberalism and so reinforces the problem.

In short, we are going to have to challenge the current Christian culture with a more traditionalist one.

So what is the problem with Christianity today? One problem has to do with a preeminent Christian virtue, that of caritas. In the Bible we read quotes like the following:

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

38 This is the first and great commandment.

39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
And this:

as you would that men should do to you, do you also to them in like manner

Such quotes have led to a belief amongst many Christians that the highest virtue, and the path to salvation, is a selfless love of the other that transcends any particular distinctions. This can then lead to the idea that the best Christian is the one who goes furthest in sacrificing himself for the "other".

You can see how this fits in with liberalism. The liberal script is similar: the liberal elite considers itself morally superior insofar as it practises non-discrimination toward the other, unlike the non-liberal mainstream.

The current, popular understanding of caritas within Christian culture has major problems. It dissolves the particular loves and loyalties on which communities are founded in favour of a "perfected love" which is proved by "selflessly" transcending the particular. The Christian subject effectively becomes an abstracted individual, just as the liberal subject is abstracted.

Once again, we traditionalists are up against what has become established as an orthodoxy. So how do we challenge this orthodoxy?

Not by rejecting caritas as a virtue. If we love God, and if we hold that men are made in the image of God, then our loving concern for other men does not stop at those to whom we are more particularly related.

However, that doesn't mean that our particular loves and duties are rendered null and void. The Catholic Church has recognised this by formulating an "ordo caritas":

The exercise of charity would soon become injudicious and inoperative unless there be in this, as in all the moral virtues, a well-defined order...

The precedence is plain enough...Regarding the persons alone, the order is somewhat as follows: self, wife, children, parents, brothers and sisters, friends, domestics, neighbours, fellow-countrymen, and all others.

It's important, too, that Christians don't talk themselves into an abstracted sense of self that isn't enjoined on them by the Bible. As I pointed out in a previous discussion of this issue:

If I love my neighbour as I love myself I will wish for him the objective goods in life. That will include that he enjoy membership in a traditional community of his own. I will want his life to be rightly ordered.

But remember - I am loving him as I love myself - so to the extent that I wish upon him this objective good so too would I wish it upon myself and to those closest to me.

And my first responsibility in working for the achievement of these goods is to myself and those closest to me extending out in a circle to my family and friends, my neighbours, my countrymen and then all others.

Nor is caritas to be understood as a forced emotionalism. The Catholic doctrine is that the seat of caritas is to be found in the will rather than the emotions:

Its seat, in the human will. Although charity is at times intensely emotional, and frequently reacts on our sensory faculties, still it properly resides in the rational will a fact not to be forgotten by those who would make it an impossible virtue.

Finally, it's also important to remember the context in which Jesus was teaching. Judaism at the time of Jesus was divided into a number of currents: the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Zealots. Jesus appears to criticise the leading faults of each of these currents. The Zealots, for instance, were focused on violence; the Sadducees were elitist; and the Pharisees were concerned with the letter of the law:

An important binary in the New Testament is the opposition between law and love. Accordingly, the New Testament, presents the Pharisees as obsessed with man-made rules (especially concerning purity) whereas Jesus is more concerned with God’s love; the Pharisees scorn sinners whereas Jesus seeks them out. Because of the New Testament's frequent depictions of Pharisees as self-righteous rule-followers, the word "pharisee" has come into semi-common usage in English to describe a hypocritical and arrogant person who places the letter of the law above its spirit.

The story of the Good Samaritan can be read in the light of this. An "expert in the law stood up to test Jesus" and asked Jesus who exactly was his neighbour that he should love as himself. Jesus then told the story of the man who was robbed and who wasn't helped by passers-by until a stranger, a Samaritan, came by.

A reader, Gerry T. Neal, commented on this in a previous discussion as follows:

Jesus was not interested in answering the man's question but in addressing the spirit that lay behind it. By asking "who is my neighbor", the lawyer was hoping to get a definition of "neighbor" that would enable him to say "okay, these are the people I have to love, I don't have to love these other people". This reflects the legalistic attitude of "I will do what is required of me - but only the very minimum".

The parable Jesus tells, in which a robbed person, left to die on a highway, is ignored by the people who should be most concerned with helping him, and is helped by a member of a despised rival ethnic group, speaks to that attitude. The people who walked by the man in need found reasons to justify their not stopping to help. That is the kind of justification the lawyer was looking for. Jesus was not willing to give it.

This parable then, does not mean that our specific duties to love specific people, have been abrogated by Jesus and replaced with a universal command to love everybody equally. It means that our requirement to love our family and kin, our friends and neighbors, and our countryman, does not translate into an excuse for a lack of compassion and charity towards others to whom we do not have those specific bonds of attachment.

We are not to have a "closed off" attitude of doing the minimum required by the letter of the law. That's not supposed to be the motivating spirit. Jesus emphasised this because his interrogator was a Pharisee. If we were walking along and saw someone of another ethnic group in trouble would we help out? Or would we turn our backs because we thought, in a legalistic sense, we weren't obliged to assist?

Surely it is possible to think that we would stop and help a fellow human being, as an act of loving concern (caritas), without then dissolving all particular human relationships into an abstracted "serve the other". The former is clearly enjoined on us by the Bible. The latter is not.